


Only I Know Green

by atria



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-19
Packaged: 2019-08-01 20:49:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16291535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atria/pseuds/atria
Summary: AU. Tezuka is a conflicted grad student teaching intro to English poetry for a freshman requirement. Echizen is taking university classes in Japan while he hides from the media mid-injury. You can see where this is going. (Characters are tagged based on who'll be making an appearance eventually)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a poem by Yehuda Amichai and translated by Robert Alter.
> 
> This story is entirely self-indulgent, I don't know much about college education in Japan and the details are very much fudged in service of plot. Sorry, let me know if anything offends :|

Intro to English Poetry is in a windowless basement with one fan and no computer. Only about half the seats in the small classroom are filled. The students’ clothes are crisp and they mostly look at their phones or their hands: It’s the first day for new freshmen.

Tezuka stands when the little hand on the clock shifts to the hour. “Good morning. This class is an introduction to poetry for students who learned English as a second language before university. The required texts —”

The door creaks open as Tezuka finishes his terse self-introduction. It’s done quietly, but the hinges are old. A boy with a baseball cap pulled down over his face lopes in. He chooses a seat in the vacant front row, apparently oblivious to the stares from his classmates, who were all painstakingly punctual. 

Tezuka goes on to the next item. Attendance-taking. He gets through all the names in the register save a Horio Satoshi who transferred to Business English at the last minute, but the boy in front still hasn’t raised his hand. Tezuka calls on him.

“I’m not on the register because I enrolled late.” The face below the cap is tanned and somewhat familiar. The arm in the air is taut and sinewy like a serious athlete’s.

“Your name?”

“Echizen Ryoma.” At least one student gasps, and suddenly everyone’s neck is craning to look at Japan’s youth tennis prodigy, who came as close to the Wimbledon final as any Japanese player has ever got before dropping out last minute with an unexplained training injury. Tezuka can’t blame them for being curious, but even so.

“Class,” he says. Fourteen heads snap up to look at him, mostly guilty-looking save for Echizen, who’s as expressionless as a teenager.

The rest of the hour passes in course logistics. It’s as dull for Tezuka as it is for the students, and it’s a relief to assign a Bishop poem and call it a day. As the last student straggles out with a harried bow, Tezuka has a moment before the blackboard wondering when he turned into one of his high school senseis.

Later in his tiny office, Tezuka types a name into the computer. A student profile shows up along with a six-by-four photo, and Tezuka’s tea nearly comes out through his nose. The picture was obviously taken on a phone, and the pixelation manages to make Echizen’s pupils look both square and blood-red. The clumsy hat looks like it’s trying to disguise baldness. In the foreground, Echizen scowls.

Tezuka’s still smiling slightly as he adds the name to the course list: 越前 リョーマ. Like most Japanese children of his generation, he knows the first and last names by heart.

*

Oishi is actually home for dinner when he gets back. It’s happening more regularly these days, as his medical studies transition from backbreaking hours in the science labs to revision for the ruthless qualifying exams.

Oishi seems rather relieved about it really. He’s still slightly afraid of blood, even dead people’s. 

“How was your day?” Oishi calls from the kitchen. The apartment is drafty after dark but the scent wafting through the room is salty and warm.

“Fine.” Tezuka sets the dinner table and pulls out his Norton Anthology. “What are you making?” he remembers to ask without looking up from his book. The question is rhetorical. Usually whoever gets home first heats some combination of miso stock, frozen fish, vegetables and udon on the stove, but even after three years as flatmates they’re still politely pretending to be interested in each other’s cooking.

Oishi comes out with the pot instead of replying. Today they’re down to crabsticks instead of fish, and Tezuka mentally sighs. Neither of them is much good at remembering the groceries. “Thank you for the meal,” he intones, lifting his chopsticks. Oishi mumbles to himself as he pages through a textbook. The heater hums meditatively in the background. 

They’ve lived this way for the better part of their time at university, and Tezuka can’t bring himself to talk about next year.

*

After dinner, they each go to their rooms. It’s more habit than anything: Tezuka can still hear most of the words Oishi says through the thin wall. 

Tonight, Oishi’s pacing. Tezuka’s read the same word five times.  _ Like disaster, disaster, disaster — _ he says it in his head till all the meaning vanishes, first the one he swotted up from the vocabulary sheets then the one he carefully pieced together and relearned over years with the same books in the library and his room and on the old school roof, walking down the street or talking to a friend and realising this, this is the part of life that line described. 

Today, it’s no use. The poem is as foreign as the first time he read it in high school.

He shuts the book. He might not even be doing this next year, he reasons. Or he might be doing it for the rest of his life. There’s plenty of time.

He knocks on Oishi's door. “Game?” 

Some rustling, then a sigh. Tezuka can almost see Oishi flipping through all the unfinished pages he’s assigned himself for tonight. “Yeah, let’s do it.” 

They walk out to one of the rare neighbourhood courts with floodlights. Seeing it tucked on a back street was one of the reasons Tezuka consented to this shared apartment as a sophomore. 

Even years later, Tezuka still thinks most clearly when he has a racket in hand. As he dives and leaps for the ball, his concentration hones itself to a fine point. Images come to his mind as sharp as morning light: Twist serve. Zone. An experimental drive volley that he isn’t quite the right height to pull off, but when had he first seen that move? Playing in the ’06 district finals, against Echizen — ah. That’s where he knows the face. Beyond magazine covers and televised matches, he felt a certain familiarity with the movements of that body, the way he always does after a match he felt in his marrow. 

Echizen was cocky and unaccustomed to loss, but he’d grinned in the end with teeth out. It was a good game. Tezuka remembers telling him so after, at which the boy scowled. He remembers thinking Echizen would go places with tennis, if he only let himself. He’d looked forward to playing again. But all that was before Germany and his shoulder, of course.

He seals the last twist smash at the net, breathing heavily as he comes down. Oishi’s panting too: they’re both less fit than they were in their junior high days. 

Tezuka still wins, though: 6-3, 4-6, 6-1. 

“Good game,” he says. It’s a reflex these days, but he means it: he feels every muscle in his calf and thigh and arms, and sitting in an office chair tomorrow is going to be a happy ache. It makes him feel not so much alive as  _ himself _ , whenever he lets his body play like this.

“You went hard today,” Oishi observes. “Got something on your mind?”

The answer bubbles out of Tezuka, surprising himself. “I always play to win.” He hasn’t used the line since the earlier part of junior high, said it rarely even then. He nearly laughs.

Oishi grins. “Now you’re making jokes, but you’re not going to tell me why if I ask, eh?” 

This is why Oishi is a good friend. They walk home in companionable silence, each bargaining with himself about the work they have left before the shower and bed.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tezuka angsts. Class continues. He'll loosen up a bit around Ryoma next time.

The class is down three people by Thursday. It’s fewer essays to grade and the more the merrier for Business English, Tezuka supposes. On his way to the room, he saw a gaggle of students peering through the doorway. He’s briefly confused before he remembers: Echizen. Right. 

They scatter when he strides up, though, and a glance at the room reveals Echizen isn’t here yet anyway. At nine o’clock sharp, he slides into his seat just as Tezuka is about to open his mouth.

“We’re not going to talk about the Bishop poem today. I’ll hand out the new poem we’re looking at for the first part of class. After we go over that, I’ll give you thirty minutes to write your first response to Bishop now that you’ve spent a couple of days with it.” 

Every face in the room is shocked save Echizen’s, who looks like he’s fighting a yawn. “It won’t be graded.” A collective sigh of relief. Tezuka wants to smile. “I’m just interested in how you react to a poem for the first time. Short is fine. Writing in Japanese is fine.”

Tezuka hands out the printouts for class discussion. It’s “[Bluebeard](https://www.bartleby.com/131/23.html)”. The images are a little lurid, but it was the first one he was seriously taught, and the first poem he used in each of the two semesters he ran this class before. 

He takes a breath, and performs. “Who thinks they know what this poem is about?”

The lesson goes well. Three of the girls speak up of their own accord: Miyuki, Kawakami, Yanagi. A boy named Yamamoto yells from the back, “Bluebeard is annoyed his wife is poking at his stuff. Like me when my sister sneaks into my room!” Tezuka curbs him, but not as sternly as he should. 

Every time a student raises their hand, Tezuka is nearly nervous. He wants someone to get what he’s slowly steering them towards on their own, but also doesn’t. This moment should be shared, the first time.

“Think. Why would anyone write a poem about a wife-murderer? Look at line six: ‘No heads of women slain/ For greed like yours.’ How can we let Bluebeard get away with killing people just because he says the victims were greedy?” The class stares. Dictionary pages blur with rapid flipping. No one is looking at the clock.

“I’ll give you a clue. Do you think the speaker in this poem is a man or a woman?”

“It’s a woman.” Heads turn. This is the first time Echizen has spoken in class. Technically he was out of turn, but he seemed to talk more to himself than anyone else. Tezuka nods at him. “Echizen-kun, explain.”

“Uh. Yeah. The poet is writing about Bluebeard’s wife. It’s all ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the poem so you can’t really tell if it’s a man or not, but I guess it makes a lot more sense for the wife to be mad. That greed stuff is criticising Bluebeard, not his wives.”

Tezuka sees it on their faces when they get it. Even Echizen looks a little less expressionless. This was the feeling he fell in love with at seventeen, the first moment in Advanced Lit when he and his classmates looked back at the words on the page and knew they were finally seeing the same thing, more than when he went hiking with his family or watched a film with a girl. More than during tennis.

He lets them be quiet for a while before he speaks. “Good, Echizen. There’s more to the poem than that, but you can keep reading in your own time. Talk to me more after class if you want. We need to get started on Bishop. You have thirty minutes till the end of class to write.” 

He goes back to his desk and sits as the groans and mutters and scratching of pens start. Back to college student mode. They had it, though; the little space of time where a poem was more riveting than gossip or sports or a detective novel. Tezuka lets himself relax. “Bluebeard” is a good one.

*

“Sensei.” 

Tezuka pauses with the blackboard duster in his hand. It’s Echizen. “Tezuka-san is fine. I’m not a professor.” 

Echizen ignores him. “Do you still play?” 

So he remembers. Tezuka turns around. Echizen’s cap is tipped back and he’s looking at Tezuka without shyness. In the backlight of the board, it’s clear his neck is paler than the rest of his body, the white work of his throat the only sign he might be nervous at all about stopping the teacher for this.

Does he mean it as a challenge? 

For a moment, Tezuka hesitates. He’s done with the cleaning and his arms hang by his sides. Then his senses return and he is sure he has no business playing his hobby sport with a student, let alone a student who exceeded him years and years ago. 

Tezuka lifts his bag. “Yes,” he says over his shoulder as he leaves the room.

Echizen is the sort of student who pushes bounds. He’ll have to remember that.

*

Fuji-sensei places the stack of papers face down on his desk. 

“What do you think, Tezuka?”

“Fuji-sensei. I —”

“Fuji is fine,” he reminds Tezuka with a smile. His eyes shut as he does but Tezuka has the feeling he sees everything anyway. It’s very creepy. “Or you could call me Shuusuke-san if you like. We’re old colleagues.” 

Tezuka’s reminded of his run-in with Echizen. He scowls and looks down. “I think it’s bad. The lines don’t scan. Japanese syllables don’t work the same way, but other people make them sound better,” he says to the floor. Fuji-sensei always manages to make him feel like a child.

“You’re being too hard on yourself. I think it’s not bad stuff, but you’re not doing your imagination justice. Look.” Fuji-sensei stands suddenly, not teasing anymore. He picks books from his shelf without searching, though the titles have no order that Tezuka can see. “Read this. Or this. And might as well try this one well you’re at it.”

Tezuka looks. They’re all poets he’s never heard of before, who probably don’t even write in English. There are two names on each cover: one poet and one translator. 

Translations  _ into _ English, Tezuka realises. 

“Translation isn’t always about fidelity. Or it is, but not to the letter. Or character. You can figure it out for yourself.” Fuji-sensei’s voice leaves no room for doubt, self-directed or otherwise.

“Alter’s at Berkeley, you know,” he adds, nodding at the first book in the pile. “Did they put him in the prospectus?”

Tezuka doesn’t say anything. The sheaf Fuji handed him a month ago is still lying unopened on his nightstand — there are always other things to read. 

Fuji-sensei sighs. “I take it you haven’t looked at it. You know the application deadline is in three months?”

Tezuka nods. 

“Look. I don’t know what you have on your mind, but it’s normal to have doubts about these things. Just don’t sit on it for too long. You’re working hard enough and your thesis is progressing decently. Worry about the rest if you have to, but not about that, okay?”

Tezuka nods again. Fuji-sensei’s gaze is like a touch. 

“Good. I want to see another draft in two weeks. Now get out, I have minions to wrangle. Cactus pear?”

Tezuka avoids looking at the tray on the desk. The purple fruit have always reminded him of highly pickled kidneys. “Thank you, sensei,” he says on his way out, and thinks he hears a chuff of a laugh as the door shuts. 

*

Grading is the worst part of the job.  _ Which I signed up for _ , Tezuka tells himself sternly. It doesn’t help much. He sticks the hand that isn’t holding a pen in the bowl of misshapen dough from Oishi’s latest attempt at baking. It squelches. He sighs. He really should buy some of the ready-made mix so Oishi can’t  _ not _ use it the next time the study stress strikes, preservatives be damned.

It’s midnight, and Oishi isn’t home yet. Even during third-year finals he wasn’t out so late. 

Tezuka’s mother used to wait up for him at home whenever he was out late with his friends or returning from a red-eye flight. No one ever told him how he ought to act around other people once he stopped living at home. Instead, he copies her without being too obvious about it. 

He goes back to his stack. He knows he promised no letter grades, but that makes the comments more important. Fuji-sensei told him his style was “earnest but dispiriting” after his first go at teaching, and he has tried harder since then to please, to say the sort of things he doesn’t care to hear himself.

“The author writes that loss is easy, but she can’t bring herself to write about her real loss, which is a person and not a thing. She goes through the whole poem avoiding talking about it, and she has to force herself to at the end. She makes the feeling seem stronger by pretending it isn’t.” It’s three sentences, lightly written in English, the writing neat but boyish. The name on the top says simply “Echizen”.

Tezuka sits up. He, like half of Japan, knows that Echizen Ryoma spent more of his childhood in America than Japan, but the boy clearly has something more than a quasi-native speaker’s grasp of the language. He has intuition. One day, he might learn to read poetry with pleasure. 

That makes the sheet before him much more of a let-down. 

“You’re mostly correct, but can do much better.” He writes in Kanji. “What’s the difference between the loss the speaker feels and the ones she says she doesn’t? Why does she call loss an ‘art’? Next time, show that you’ve read every word in the poem the way only you can.” 

He reads it over, considering. Fuji-sensei won’t approve, but this feels correct. And it would do, he thinks, for Echizen to act less freely around him. For his own good.

“Also, please distinguish the speaker from the poet,” he adds, then puts the pen down at the turn of the key in the lock. Oishi’s back.

“I’m home,” he says. “How are the cookies?”

Tezuka looks down. Ah, so that’s what they were supposed to be.

“They were very — chewy.” Yes, that’s good, that’s technically true. “And soft,” he says with more conviction. “Much better than the last time.” Which isn’t saying much, considering Oishi confused the chocolate powder with coffee grounds. 

They were fine coffee grounds. It was the night before a very high-stakes exam. Tezuka understands, he really does.

“I’m working on it,” Oishi says with evident satisfaction. “Is that homework?” He glances down at Echizen’s essay, and Tezuka feels and fights the urge to cover his writing.

“Ouch,” Oishi says. “That’s not nice.” Tezuka studies him. He’s grinning a little loosely, even considering the compliment to his cooking. There’s red on his face that isn’t just a blush.

“Oishi,” he says sternly. “Are you drunk?”

“I ran into Eiji. I haven’t seen him for a year, Tezuka! He took me to a bup — pub.” Oishi giggles. He seems to take Tezuka’s words as license to act the part. 

Then he frowns earnestly. “But Tezuka, I really think you should change what you said a bit. Students have feelings.”

“What do you suggest?” 

Oishi ponders it as he sticks a misshapen cookie in his mouth. A chocolate chip, barely molten, juts from the dough like a pimple. “Hm. Maybe add a smiley face?”

*

The essays go out first thing in class. Most students seem to take it fine, flicking an eye over the page with freshman anxiety and putting it away in relief when there isn’t a grade or an overly discouraging remark. 

Tezuka doesn’t let himself look for Echizen’s reaction as he begins on “Ozymandias”. He dislikes the Romantics — too obvious — but they make good pedagogy. 

The class seems to disagree. The hour is made long by murmurs and longing gazes at the clock. Tezuka wonders if they are picking up on his boredom. The sun is low and the air hazy and damp for fall, and Yamamato in the back is clearly fighting drowsiness. He doesn’t seem to try too hard. 

At the end of class, Echizen leaves at the bell. Tezuka’s relieved. That, he tells himself, is the end of that.

*

Tezuka is a slow reader. He goes over a poem word by word. He looks up all the possible paths each one might lead, learns its sound, draws it out slowly in his mind and on his tongue. He still needs a dictionary for most poems.

Most people don’t, he knows. People who know English as a first language, but even foreign students, do this more easily than he does after nearly six full years in the discipline. His pride used to care about whether it was effort or gift, but even that feels secondary nowadays. Maybe this is like tennis, where he just had to know when to give up.

He thinks of the prospectus on the nightstand and the tennis school flyers from Ryuuzaki-sensei all those years ago, long-lost now — foreign words and foreign names and a sport that turned out foreign to his body, after all. He thought it was his life, then he grew up.

_ Get a grip.  _

His pencil skitters idly below a word whose definition he just copied in the margin. He underlines the senses of the word: three in total. Here are the paths but he doesn’t know where they might lead.


End file.
